Obama’s Itching For A Fight On Illegal Immigrants

For all his rhetoric regarding coming together, the man is constantly looking for a fight, and will create one if necessary. He flew across the country to Las Vegas and then back to make yet another campaign speech Tuesday

(NY Times) Speaking at a high school here in a state that has seen rapid growth in its Hispanic population, the president praised a bipartisan group of senators who proposed their own sweeping immigration overhaul a day earlier, saying their plan was very much in line with his own proposals.

Mr. Obama warned, however, that “the closer we get, the more emotional this debate is going to become.” He said that if Congress did not move forward “in a timely fashion” on its own legislation, he would send up a specific measure – something the White House has put off for now – and demand a vote.

The president’s speech immediately exposed potential fault lines in the coming debate. He said, for example, that there must be a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants “from the outset,” a statement that would seem at odds with the assertion by some senators that citizenship must be tied to tighter border security.

Obama gives lip service to border security in his own outline, but wants no part of actually and truly securing the border before a blanket amnesty occurs (which doesn’t make all those who have come to this country legally, have done everything required of them, and are still waiting, particularly happy). This will end up the same way everything else ends up: there will be some conflict, some infighting, but things are still slowly getting done, then Obama will jump in, create massive strife, start casting blame and insulting people, and will create hard feelings.

He even attempted to do his typical strife during the speech, as The Other McCain points out

“Most of ‘us’ used to be ‘them,'” Obama said. “Unless you were one of the first Americans – a Native American – you came from someplace else,” he added, listing off waves of immigrants. “All of those folks – before they were ‘us,’ they were ‘them.'”

Obama’s proposal, laid out in a fact sheet distributed by the White House, differs in two ways from the congressional one: it treats same-sex couples the same way as straight couples, and doesn’t include a “trigger mechanism” to make reform contingent on stricter border security efforts. Both are potential deal-breakers with congressional Republicans, though neither earned a direct mention from Obama in his remarks.

“Unless there’s real enforcement triggers, we’re not going to have a bill that moves on,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said Tuesday in an interview with radio host Rush Limbaugh.

“Any solution should be a bipartisan one, and we hope the President is careful not to drag the debate to the left and ultimately disrupt the difficult work that is ahead in the House and Senate,” warned Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Speaker of the House John Boehner.

Without real enforcement measures, the legislation may barely pass the Senate, if it even makes it to the floor, but will fail big time in the House. Of course, when this progresses beyond the “framework” phase and moves towards actually crafting legislation, we can, and should, expect Obama to jump in and cause problems. It’s just the way this: divisive: community: agitator: operates.